The past few months have been fairly hectic and, yet again, I find I’ve been neglecting my blogging duties. This is something I deeply regret, and something I still keep promising myself I’ll rectify, but the simple truth is my current novel in progress, the editing of the next novel to be published and my constant attempts at promoting If I Never are now taking up most of my time.

This week, however, I am taking a few days off. The latest pass of edits on Children of the Resolution were completed on Monday and I’ve promised myself I won’t return to writing As Morning Shows the Day until next Monday. So I thought I’d spend a few moments “filling in the gaps”.

As Morning Shows the Day is gradually moving towards its conclusion. I now have about 154,000 words written, I’m expecting to write close on another 50,000 and will probably edit the same again! Probably, with the edits, another 4 to 6 months work.

The edits of Children of the Resolution are coming along nicely. Have trimmed by about 15,000 words and I’m just now waiting for more input from Team Legend. I think we’re pretty close but there may be more tweaking, yet.

My latest interview with fellow Legend Press author, Josie Henley-Einion, is now available here. Always enjoy chatting to other Legend authors and in turn I’ll be interviewing Josie here in the not too distant future. Keep checking back.

Also, my guest article — Stopping Short of an Obituary Notice– has just been posted on the excellent literary magazine website The View from Here. Take a look when you have time and please consider subscribing to the paper version. Fantastic content of interest to readers and writers, and it looks really snazzy, too!

Finally, I’d just like to once more draw your attention to the right hand sidebar. Whilst I don’t manage to keep up with my blogging endeavours as much as I once did, I do have a number of other platforms I use to send out short updates quite regularly. Take a look and take your pick.

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to be made Featured Author on the rather splendid fReado website. For those of you unfamiliar with it, fReado is an extremely useful free promotional tool for writers and publishers — providing an easy way to share samples of your work and build a readership. The ladies and gentlemen behind this excellent platform really have come up with something that helps empower the author. I’m already seeing benefits.

As many of you — especially those who’ve been following my blog for some time — will already know, I have a tendency to grow concerned whenever someone says that something cannot be said, that it may be “offensive” or is in some way “poor form”. Not naturally a person who goes out of his way to cause offence, or to be confrontational, I nevertheless grow suspicious when the aforementioned terms are used in an attempt to dictate, or guide, what others can or cannot express.

So earlier today, during a conversation on Twitter, I found myself once again treading this already familiar path. Chatting to a fellow writer (and very lovely lady) I was pointed to a blog post dealing with some of the don’ts of promotion. The post contained some excellent advice but I was immediately concerned by one point that stipulated a writer should not say anything online — specifically nothing negative about books, other authors and reviewers.

Now, as I’ve already pointed out, I very rarely deliberately set out to trash someone, or to argue publicly with them. Thus far, reviews of If I Never have largely been extremely positive — and I doubt I’d lower myself to argue publicly with a reviewer, anyway. Nevertheless, I can certainly envisage scenarios where I might politely correct certain points, for example, and if the response was offensive, I would certainly pursue the argument (with appropriate dignity, naturally ;) )

On the matter of not trashing other writers or books in general… well, I’ll always express my honest opinion — and do so as forthrightly as I deem fit. The notion that this might somehow come back and bite me, damage my sales, say, is something I find highly unlikely (the readership I’ve already built up, I feel, expects honesty from me — and if I couch my expressed opinion in strong terms I think they are already familiar enough with me to know that I’ll be doing so with, as I see it, good reason.) However, even if my honesty did threaten the sales of my novel, I tend to feel that — admittedly under exceptional circumstances — I would still speak my mind. Why? Well, quite simply, how could I not? What would that really say about me if I withheld a negative opinion simply because I was afraid it might damage me in some way.

As to how it might affect the author concerned, of course, this is always a consideration. I’ve been around long enough to know how devastating a negative comment can be — and whilst we all have to learn to deal with that, as writers and individuals, I’d only ever pick on someone my own size (or bigger), so to speak.

This isn’t to say that we should all say whatever the hell we like about other people and their work, of course, without giving it careful thought. It’s vital that, where they can, writers support each other — and as a newly published author I’m well aware of how fortunate I am and, whenever possible, try to help others along this pretty demanding path. Generally speaking, if I don’t like a piece of work, I’ll say nothing about it rather than publicly trashing it. But we are writers. By definition, we write, we share ideas, we communicate and, yes, sometimes we argue like cat and dog. Is that a bad thing? Is it healthy creatively to tiptoe around opinions that some might not like?

The very idea that it is “poor form” to contribute to the cut and thrust of “the literary life”, to express an honest (if negative) opinion, simply because “the writing community” or some imagined social convention considers it so is not something I’m prepared to subscribe to. Yes, I take time to consider any response I make, and, where possible, do it as inoffensively as possible.

But I will post online about the books I love and hate, about the writers who inspire me and those who make me despair. On occasion, I might even respond to a negative criticism. And if that’s poor form, then so be it.

My regular readers will probably already be familiar with my habit of churning out, as some would have it, pretty big chunks of writing at regular intervals. I’ve always enjoyed getting words down and, it’s true, I can be a little obsessive at times.

That’s why at the beginning of the year I didn’t make any resolutions to moderate my output. After taking time off over Christmas I had a sneaking suspicion that 2010 would find me, creatively, at least, even more fired up than I have been in the past.

And I wasn’t mistaken. Whilst I have managed to keep a fairly healthy balance, taking time away from all things writing-related, as much as possible, I have so far this year nailed down 25,000 words — taking As Morning Shows the Day up to 128,000 words. It’s a huge project which should, fingers crossed, be finished late spring/early summer, but it has been and continues to be a delight to write. Part of this, of course, as I may have mentioned before, is the fact that I’m now writing as “a published author”. Knowing that the piece you’re working on is — unless you really louse it up — going to end up “out there” with your other work is a great motivator (for me, at least.)

I think with this project, however, it also has a great deal to do with the novel’s origin. It isn’t an entirely new piece. In fact, I wrote the first version of it something like fifteen years ago. The kind of tail that requires distance, a sense of nostalgic retrospection, I didn’t do too bad a job with that earlier version — but it did have a number of problems, all largely centred around lack of experience, both personal experience, that is, and writing experience. The essence was there, but it lacked scale and skill.

How much of these qualities I now possess, I don’t know, but it’s certainly safe to say that I am more accomplished as a writer — and hopefully as a human being! And I’m extremely happy with the results so far.

I think I may have mentioned here in the past that writing this novel feels very much like an act of remembrance (which, of course, it is, though not quite in the way I mean.) My approach has been to write it without looking at that earlier version, to wander through my memories of what it was and recreate from that, and I think this is more than anything is helping me achieve the nostalgic tone I’ve already mentioned. It’s as if I lived it rather than wrote it. The old informs the new and lends it something I couldn’t otherwise have achieved.

Which actually fits rather nicely with the whole theme of the novel: “the childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day” — Milton, Paradise Regained.

“If I Never is Gary Murning’s debut novel and I must say it is an exceptional work of art. It is a well-written novel. In my interview with Gary he expressed how all rules of writing were not adhered to, some of them needed to be broken to make this book what it is and I must say this was a great path to take, it definitely adds to the reader’s experience. If I Never is a page turner and especially the last quarter of the book I did not want to put it down, I just wanted to find out where we were going to end up next. I thoroughly enjoyed my reading experience and I will be keeping my eye out for future works by Gary.“

Today, my recent interview with the good people at the Struggling Authors website went live. Some really interesting questions and, perhaps more importantly, the announcement of what I think is a fantastic If I Never-related competition. Trust me, you really don’t want to miss it!

Below is an interview-taster. To read more and for your chance to enter the simply splendiferous, stupendous and utterly stunning competition (I’m not over-egging it, am I?), click on the link below.

Your first book, If I Never, is out now and doing very well. Is there anything about the book you want to tell us that’s not in the blurb?

Well, funnily enough, yes! The first thing that struck me when I read the blurb (which I didn’t actually write), was how successfully it gave a sense of what the central elements of the plot were. But, of course, given the limited space, it simply couldn’t mention the way in which I tried to break a few rules and write the kind of novel that plays with convention. Something that most readers have grasped quite readily is the fact that, in places, I quite deliberately push it as far as I can — layering plot and character, adding twist after twist and generally having a great deal of fun in the process. In some ways, I have to admit, I was sticking two fingers up at those who had told me in the past that a novel has to be written a certain way. I wanted the plot structure to suggest the unpredictable, unrelenting nature of life and, fortunately, the vast majority have the seemed to understand that.

To read more and enter the completely unmissable competition, click here!